SEO Testing: Analyzing On-Page Changes

As SEOs we always want to understand the impact of site changes. Yet analyzing the data is challenging, especially in an enterprise environment with frequent site pushes and page updates. One of the biggest challenges is tracking when the change happened, what exactly was the change and what other changes might have occurred which would impact the analysis. SEORadar makes this part easy with our source code archive and change and alert history. We keep that permanent change record needed for your analysis. With our new ‘Change Analysis’ feature, things just got a lot better!

Unlike traditional AB testing where metrics become available immediately, with an SEO change you need to wait before you can even begin your analysis. Google needs time to index the change. Then you need to accumulate at least 2 weeks of data. This is the challenge, in a busy life of an SEO! Going back in time to analyze a change impact is particularly painful. Now, you with single action you can schedule a change analysis and SEORadar will send you an email when that analysis is ready to be viewed.

Here is how you do it!

Let’s say a page change was made which removed an H2 from your page which contained a focus keyword (we monitor titles, H1s and H2s and generate alerts if a focus keyword is removed). This would generate an Alert in SEORadar. With this feature, you will get the ‘analyze change’ button:

When you click the ‘Analyze Change’ button, you will set the parameters for the analysis.

The analysis will compare metrics prior to the change to post change, but with a buffer period to give Google time to index the change.

You can compare a specific URL or you can set a pattern if the URL is representative of a set of URLs.

Once the report is ready, you will get an email notification with a link to the report.

The report will analyze search conole data for clicks, click throughs and keyword rankings. The report will look like this:

Of course other changes might have happened to that page over the time period of the test. Fortunately, we have the full change history for you to analyze and factor into your impact analysis. We include in the report a full list of SEO impacting changes that happened in the analysis time frame. This will help you ascertain as whether other changes could be skewing the results.

SEO Testing

This is a great mechanism for implementing an SEO testing methodology or updating old posts that are not driving much traffic. Simple make the changes. We provide a report of all pending analysis and tests so you can see what tests are outstanding and when the results will be available.

Coming soon, we will give you the ability to define a ‘test’ group of URLs and a ‘control’ to compare the results.

This feature is available to Enterprise service levels. Contact Us if you would like to test it out and discuss an upgrade.